Intersectionality: Don’t knock it till you try it
On February 22, 2015, Patricia Arquette won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the movie Boyhood. She finished her acceptance speech by saying “To every woman who gave birth, to every tax payer and citizen of this nation: We have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America!”
Like Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez, I too applauded at the end of her speech. Her speech also got a lot of attention in a variety of talk shows.
Like stated in the video, for every dollar a man makes in the U.S. a white woman makes 78 cents, a black woman 64 cents and after looking it up, a Latina makes 54 https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/07/28/for-low-wage-latina-workers-gender-pay-gap-vast/Tfym9meXAkvAfDKHdhpqiK/story.html. More recently, on September 20, 2015 Viola Davis won the Emmy for outstanding actress in a drama series. http://variety.com/2015/tv/awards/viola-davis-emmy-award-winner-best-actress-first-black-woman-1201597643/ noted that she had become the first black women to win in this category, sixty-seven years since the Emmys came to be. Also noted by Variety was that this year also marked the first time two black women were nominated for this category at a time. They also list the women that have been nominated, some more than once, totaling 12 nomination spots since 1952, when the category first started, including this year’s two. What was most impressive about this day was Davis’s speech in which she said, “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.” The opportunity to lead, because there is a chance that supporting actress might have more than 12 black women nominated, but still not as much as white women. Her argument is that there are many more great black actresses who would be nominated just as often as white women but how can that be when most shows and movies are written with a white persons as leading roles.
Although Davis was only looking at the aspect of opportunity we can view her situation intersectionaly. Intersectionality, as suggested by Patricia Hills Collins, is “a particular way of understanding social location in terms of crisscross systems of oppression”.
As a black female actress, Davis is more than likely getting paid less than Arquette and having a much harder time finding roles where a black women is the lead character, roles that naturally pay more. In her career route, she is at the intersection of female and black but her dedication to her job is as intense as her colleagues.
So what’s the point of knowing where you currently stand in the crisscrossed system?
To know how exactly and to what degree you are oppressed. Knowledge is power and being aware of exactly how things are unequal to you is the first step in demanding change. Having people believe that all women of all races are equally oppressed is not going to bring the rest to the movement. I am a first generation Mexican woman living in the United States. What was fortunate for me is that I was raised in the United States since the age of two months old so I know this country better than most first generation folk but I also know what they are worried most about is to survive in the United States so they can eventually succeed in the land of opportunity. Little do they know how limiting that is even when you know perfect English and you are a U.S. citizen. The starting line is set at different levels and I find myself at the bottom. My mother who came to a completely different world with a 7th grade education and not knowing a word of English didn't have the time to look up at how things worked because she was making sure to keep herself working in the coolers and fields to provide for her family, enrolled back to school to get GED and eventually an associates for a better job. Tell me that transition didn't take hard work and dedication? Yet, she still falls in the lower middle class range. And she sure is exhausted, but still has 20 years until retirement. Once people become aware they will want change and join the many movements. If they are just told about the pay difference between males and females, they won’t bother looking more into how the oppression affects them individually. Latina women won’t find their involvement necessary since they see a bunch of white women calling attention to the problem already. From experience, they might already feel that white women will be better listened to than them, a form of learned helplessness. What they need to understand is that those women don’t have any idea what it is like to be a black or Latina woman in the United States and the struggle that is inherited. It is necessary to know where we stand to better elaborate our concerns. If they told us tomorrow that the 22% wage gap would no longer exist it would not mean victory for the black women or Latinas. It would mean black woman would still be underpaid by 14% and Latinas 24%.
Awareness of individual intersectionality will help all women to take charge of the change because one can only express what they’ve lived, it cant always be generalized just under “female”.
